I think the approach would work well in the "false positive" case, i.e. that you are always fairly certain some kind of activity is worth your time, but it ends up disappointing you every time.
On the flipside, if thinking through something makes you come up with a low expected value, you probably won't do it and won't know. But then again this can also be a pointer that you should maybe "dip your toes in" first and not commit too much time to something you don't see as promising.
that’s all intelligence is, the ability to make predictions about the future. our subconscious does most of the work, which is why it’s not “explicit”. feelings are the bubbled up (non-numeric and fuzzy) results you’re looking for.
it’s not mathematical in situ. math is something we overlay on it to bring it to a conscious, external realm of understanding.
Do you recall where? I'd be interested in reading it
I can't give a full recommendation because it's recent enough that I'm still only about halfway through it, but overall it has been worth a read so far. (I found some chapters dull -- in particular the bits about the 2008 financial crisis have just not interested me -- but I have high hopes it will regain my interest again in the rest of the chapters.)
It's also something I've read about recently, that we frequently make decisions implicitly based on probabilities and expected values, only we very rarely make these numbers explicit. If we did, we might act more rationally.
I like the idea of this a lot. I have trouble seeing how I would "get better" at predicting stuff solely through this, but perhaps forcing myself to think it through would be sufficient.